Guild Wars 2

To start with.
Don’t reply to this topic if you can only say things like “don’t game on a Mac”.

I want to suggest a native Mac OSX client.

There is an active fan base of players who are using a Mac for their gaming fun.
Arenanet supplied us a GW2 mac client, but this was in fact a wrapper, and therefore the gaming performance is no where near the possibilities the Mac hardware gives us.

On the Mac part of this forum a lot of people are asking for this. However this subsection is not “covered” by Arenanet with their attention.
So I made a support ticket, where I wanted to request this Mac Client.
However support directs me to the “Suggestions” section of this forum.
Therefore I am setting up this thread.

Mac uses OpenGL instead of DirectX and with a native client I truly think OpenGL can give players even a better performance then playing the game through DirectX.

Please give a native Mac Client a shot, because I know a big player group would really enjoy the game more and it will also attract a complete new group of potential players.

yes please. i think lot of us would really appreciate and love this

That’s a huge undertaking just for a performance boost I’m kind of worried what the implications on the development of the rest of the game would be.

they would be different programmers i think

Indeed, I think we who prefer to use the Mac are too undermined and brushed over with this sort of thing.. Especially with an MMO, if you want and need a large player base to stay afloat, then why not allocate some teams to making sure that you can have a native client for the game for every capable OS?
Giuld Wars 2 is my favorite MMO right now, but I think ESO will take my attention more, partly because they will have a dedicated Mac client.
My brother-in-law Just got a late 2012 Mac Mini (i5, Intel HD4000, 8Gigs RAM) and he is really wanting to play GW2 on it because it will run it better than his old 2008 MBP and he can’t put $1,000+ towards a good gaming Windows computer. Another thing is that Apple really needs to put proper video and image processing components in their Mac lines, Because yeah the slim factor is nice, but cutting out dedicated graphics and other components does not add to developer’s reasons of why they should also develop for Mac…

Native Mac clients for PC games are much appreciated and needed.
Heck, Steve Jobs introduced Halo that was going to be for Mac(and after it came out for the Xbox, there was a Mac version made, and I have it)

I’m not so sure they would be different programmers. Graphics and engine stuff, which is where most of the porting work would probably be, is something you need particular expertise to be good at, but people who have that expertise can still work on other parts of the code-base. Unless they’re still optimizing graphics (which would actually be nice, it would make it faster on Mac as well as PC presumably) those people would be sitting around doing nothing otherwise, which is… well, it’s not how developers work

As far as I’m concerned, unless a dedicated, non-cheap-way-out Mac port is of sufficient benefit (versus the already existing client) to justify hiring new people just to make it, they’d be better served trying to make the game as a whole faster so that the performance hit incurred by the translation layer isn’t crippling. And I get your point about the HD4000; I’ve played that on a Windows PC and it’s terribly slow for GW2. On a Mac Mini I’m surprised it’s not unusable. At least the Mini’s price is right, that’s something

I know this will probably not be that easy to create, but I think a lot of programming work can just be re-used. It is not like the game needs to be rebuild from scratch.

I want Arenanet to consider this client as an opportunity to open up an extra market and to generate more income for themselves. In the end it all comes down to money

But I think there are a lot of Mac users, who aren’t gaming that mich currently, but who are willing to (besides the current Mac beta client users). I personally think this can be like a snowball , which can become bigger when it starts rolling.

(If you compare it with another big gaming company, who have a big MMO title, then I think part of their success is also because they have a native MAC client)

I completely support this Idea. It would be a major fix to all the issues involved with wrapping the windows client for mac users. Not to mention all the new clients it would bring in because the game would now be much smoother and gamers would have a better experience overall with GW2.

It will be a lot of development work upfront, but once the work is done to make the engine work with either Direct X or OpenGL, developing the game will be easier. The current method is clunky, and leads to bugs that can’t really be dealt with.

Making the engine have a compatibility layer to plugin to either Direct X or OpenGL based on the system would be a lot better performance wise than the current situation which translates Direct X calls instead of using native OpenGL calls—other developers have done this in the past and the result is a much better client for Mac users. (A lot of WoW’s 10 million subscribers are Mac users—clearly there is a market for MMOs on the Mac.) Furthermore, users could send a flag to the system to run GW2 as OpenGL or Direct X at runtime, like WoW users can currently do—this makes performance under Wine on Linux much better which is an entire other market you could tap. (Even better, you could just recompile the game for Linux and solve the Wine issue altogether.)

I love this game, and would love it even more if it were native. I’d definitely spend more time playing if that were the case.

Macs are now prevalent everywhere. There is no longer a reason to not have games for them. We were told this was a Beta. Okay, cool. Several months have passed now so there should be no reason why it’s still in beta and not a full fledged Mac client.
Elder Scrolls Online did state they will have a mac native client so why can’t ANet do the same?

Jigsaw, “Do you want to play a game?”
User, " I can’t."
Jigsaw, “Why not?”
User, " I play on a Mac."

I do play on a mac and PC, could someone tell me what is a native client and how is different from current what?

Currently; if you want a decent gaming experience, Mac users have to use the program that runs windows; THEN run the game.

I ONLY bought this game because they released the Mac beta, Mac is all i have and all i will ever want.

Did they really release a beta without ever intending on releasing a real client, or to even update us on their plans? it seems that way.

That’s Shady, especially while they release a news blog on our American Site saying how excited they are about releasing the game in China….. NEWS FLASH we don’t care, we don’t live in China.

How about you worry about the people who already bought the game, not about the people who will buy it in the future.

It’s a shame, definitely, that a top-of-the-line souped-up Mac has to run such a beautiful game at Low graphic settings (sometimes even setting options to ‘none’). It’s tragic. The wrapper port we’re using now gives us nothing close to the full capabilities of many of our machines. We have performance that is bearable at best, but that makes for rather disappointing game-time with a game we so badly love and want to continue enjoying.

I do understand that this might be a massive undertaking or a large investment of time and resources – but I think it’s fully necessary for the rapidly growing OSX userbase if Guild Wars intends to continue to be taken seriously by fans (like me)! Even tiny startup indie-games on Steam release their games on three platforms from the get-go! It makes me sad that we’re being neglected here with a wrapper that’s neither improving nor moving out of BETA

guys please understand something, its not just mac users who get kitten perf in this game, read the support section from launch till now, its full of windows users many with insanely powerful systems that have the same perf issues the mac client has.

the problem comes from the engine design, its designed for a tricore cpu, and would need a tricore at around 7-8ghz to run decently in towns and events.

this isnt just for mac, its for windows as well, the root of this comes down to one factor, some genius had the vision of an xbox360 port of this game, it wasnt till they where past the point they could easily fix it that they realised the game was to heavy for the cpu in the 360.

some simple ways to tell this game was designed with a 360 port in mind.

1. simple control scheme that will work with game pads.

2. game dosnt use more then 3 cores efficently(360 has 3 cores)

3. dx9 gfx(360 has dx9 level gfx chipset)

i could list a few more others have mentioned(again read the support section full of people upset about this perf bs..)

they set the min specs FAR to low, they failed to give us dx10/11 support(promised before launch), they focused on trying to sell as many copies to as many people as possible, even if min spec users cant even play the game(sorry but a peek of 15-20fps isnt playable)

they should have focused on the PC as ESO developers appear to be, then ported to console IF it looked viable, had they dont that, even with a wrapper the game would have run better for everybody.

also note I have seen Windows users running

i7 3990x @4.5ghz+ with dual titans or dual 7990’s who couldnt get better then 30fps in dragon events or Lions Arch…..(some couldnt even hold 30fps even with details at low)

I have a 8350@4.7ghz, dual 7870’s, 32gb ram, and the game still runs like crap in crowds…..the main thing I got the game for was the massive world events and WvWvW…neither are what I consider playable(never drop below 30fps), despite all their promises…

I dont put the blame on the anet engine teams shoulders fully, Im betting they would like to fix it, very few programmers/coders i know/have known are happy if their code “just works” they prefer it to be as good as possible.

the problem is, anet dont see a drop in income thats noticeable due to us not playing….

I refuse to give anet any more money till they focus on the games perf period, not just for windows or mac, but in general.

I expect that to start soon, since the XBone and PS4 are now using 8 core low clocked chips with dx11 gfx……im expecting anet will see $.$ and want to cash in on that market….so they will ahve to get a team on multi core optimization and dx11 support(since that will take some load off the cpu as well)

till that happens, your best bet is bootcamp if you actually want to game on a mac….but again it wont help much with gw2 from my exp….the game just runs like crap for most people……happly for anet, most people dont know it runs like crap so they keep playing…..and many blame thier systems…..

I know my systems not to blame, even planet side 2 never drops below 30fps for me…and that games even heavier then gw2!!!!

every other game, many with FAR better gfx then gw2 runs better.

crysis3…runs like a treat, bf3 smooth as silk(never drop below 60fps, my frame cap in both of them)

just makes me sad…this game runs so poorly, and yet, i had such high hopes that i bought the DDE

Hope they get a ‘native’ Mac client before ESO comes out. Or I am outa here!